You don’t have to work in your degree subject to use your degree

Have you used your degree?

If you spend your days looking at how people make choices, weighing trade-offs and trying to work out whether a change actually caused an improvement, there’s a reasonable argument that you have. You just haven’t got “economist” in your email signature.

That distinction matters when you’re looking for your first graduate job. It’s easy to treat your degree title as a boundary around the careers you’re allowed to consider.

Studied history? Better find something involving history. Biology? Probably a laboratory. English? Publishing, perhaps.

Those are perfectly good routes. They’re also a small part of what might be open to you.

What counts as using your degree?

In its plans for a revised Teaching Excellence Framework, England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students, intends to consider graduates’ reflections on whether they use what they learned in their studies. This would sit alongside other measures, including progression and earnings. The report says it could help assess how well universities prepare graduates for their futures, regardless of their job type or salary.

It raises a question worth asking yourself: what, exactly, did you learn?

Some of it will be subject knowledge. The causes of the French Revolution. How cells divide. The assumptions behind a particular economic model.

But you also spent time doing things with that knowledge.

You compared explanations. Worked with incomplete information. Made an argument someone else could challenge. Took a complicated subject and explained it clearly enough for another person to understand.

Those activities can travel further than the subject itself.

A history graduate who has spent years comparing conflicting accounts may have something useful to bring to research or investigative work. A biology graduate accustomed to experiments may enjoy a role that involves testing ideas and interpreting results. An English graduate who can spot ambiguity and construct a clear argument may find that ability useful across communications, policy or commercial work.

None of these connections makes someone automatically qualified. They give you places to look, and evidence to build on.

Start with the work you enjoyed

“Transferable skills” is one of those phrases that appears everywhere in careers advice and explains very little.

Almost everyone claims to have communication, teamwork and problem-solving skills. Reading that list rarely helps you decide what to apply for.

Try getting more specific.

Think about a piece of university work you enjoyed, or at least found satisfying once it stopped ruining your weekend.

What were you actually doing?

• Finding a pattern in a messy dataset?
• Working out why two sources disagreed?
• Interviewing people and drawing out what mattered?
• Explaining a difficult idea to your seminar group?
• Organising a project so everyone could finish their part?

Then ask which parts you’d like to do more often.

You might have enjoyed economics but disliked building models. You might have loved the research for your dissertation and dreaded writing it. Two people with the same degree can come away wanting very different working days.

That’s useful information. Your degree title alone won’t tell you any of it.

Read beyond the job title, too

The same problem works in reverse. Job titles often tell you surprisingly little about the work.

Take our economics graduate considering product management. A particular role might involve understanding customer behaviour, analysing usage data and choosing between competing priorities. Those tasks could offer a connection to their studies.

Another role with the same title might place much more emphasis on technical delivery or require experience they don’t yet have.

The connection is something to investigate in the job description. Look at the responsibilities, the essential requirements and the training on offer. Some careers require a specific qualification or accredited route; others give you more room to demonstrate relevant abilities through different backgrounds.

A useful question is:

“Can I show that I’ve done something similar, and would I like to get better at it?”

That gives you a stronger starting point than either “this matches my degree” or “I’m sure my skills transfer somehow”.

Make the connection visible

Once you find a role that looks promising, help the employer understand the connection.

“I developed analytical skills during my degree” leaves them with quite a lot of work to do.

Something more concrete gives them evidence:

“For my dissertation, I compared three explanations for a change in consumer behaviour, tested them against survey data and explained the limitations of my findings.”

You can then connect that experience to a relevant responsibility in the advert. Be honest about the gap between an academic project and a workplace task. You’re showing a foundation you can develop.

It may also reveal something useful to you: whether you’re interested in the work itself, or simply trying to make your background fit an impressive-sounding vacancy.

Your degree gives you more than one route

You’re allowed to love your subject and pursue it directly. You’re also allowed to discover that the part you liked most belongs in a different setting.

An economics degree can be useful outside economics. A history degree can be useful somewhere with very little history in it. The connection may become clearer when you stop comparing labels and start comparing the work.

That’s a good place to begin your graduate search: what you’ve learned, what you can demonstrate, and what you want to spend your days doing.

Your degree title is one clue. It doesn’t have to be your next job title.

References

01

Office for Students. Consultation outcomes: future approach to quality regulation. Pages 38–43. Sets out the plan to consider graduates’ reflections on using what they learned, alongside progression and earnings, in a revised Teaching Excellence Framework.